Picking up on a past project of searching out seafood mixed grills and here, it just seems time to get back to that – especially since I said a year ago I’d get back to it in a month. Plus I’m kind of taking a mini-break from the 92 pizza project, or at least slowing it down. I’ve come up with a bunch of new spots that serve up mixed platters of seafood, and I went a little further afield this time, as well.
Starting from furthest afield, a trip to Tigre and a stop in at El Muelle, Paseo Victoria 278 on the waterfront. Here, a 199 peso parrillada de pescados is on the menu – no shellfish, just fish. On the surface that seems pretty expensive, especially in contrast to the places that are far fancier that I went to in the original round. But, keep in mind that was awhile back, prices have gone up drastically in the last year, particularly for seafood, and, well, Tigre is really touristy, you know? Now, they don’t have an option for a parrillada for one, which, upon receiving the mixed grill on its little brazier, seems silly, because it’s just fillets of fish – how hard is it to offer up half the number of fillets? This arrived with a whole small trout, two pejerrey (silverside), two fillets of merluza (hake), and a few smaller pieces of pez angel (angelshark). All nicely deboned other than the last which was served “on the cartilage”, so to speak. All completely unseasoned. Completely. All well and truly overcooked. All. You know what? It was pretty expensive for that.
Back in town (I’ll get back out to some of the further afield ones), a visit to the fishy branch of the well-known La Dorita parrillas (mostly, I think, known for its famous painting of The Last Supper as a backyard asado), La Pescadorita, Humboldt 1905 at Costa Rica in Palermo. I arrived at the start of the lunch hour on a Sunday and was the sole occupant for about half an hour until other folk started to trickle in. The place is very kitsch, and very sky blue. Interestingly, while “parrillada de pescados y mariscos” was listed outside on a sandwich board as a chef’s recommendation, it doesn’t actually appear on the menu anywhere. Still, apparently it’s a known commodity as, over the course of the time I was there, half a dozen tables ordered it. It comes in at a pricey 240 pesos (though at this point, a year on, my bet is the places I reviewed in the first round have raised their prices to a similar price), but it’s a whole lot of seafood. Waitress recommended that I not bother with the guarnición, the side dish, as it would be too much food – but I thought that having a salad on the side of all that meat wouldn’t be a bad thing, and I could always take some stuff home – what she didn’t say was that the side dish wasn’t included, but an extra 40 peso charge (still, it was a whopping big salad of arugula, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes), tack on to that water, coffee, and a 16 peso cubierto charge per person. Back to the seafood – excellent. Really, excellent – one of the best I’ve tried – four good sized fillets of perfectly cooked fish – salmon, sandperch, flounder and hake; and a mound of octopus, squid, cuttlefish, prawns, shrimp, and scallops. All well seasoned, properly cooked, and served with three different sauces – black olive tapenade, aioli, and provencal. Easily takes the honors as the best seafood parrillada so far.
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